Author: Candice MillardPublisher: AnchorISBN: 9780307575081Size: 15.28 MBFormat: PDF, ePubView: 1322Download
At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived. From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author: Judith Mary WilsonPublisher: Hyperink IncISBN: 1614648530Size: 24.14 MBFormat: PDF, MobiView: 5391Download
ABOUT THE BOOK The story of one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s most dangerous adventures, Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, goes beyond telling the tale of Roosevelt’s harrowing passage along an uncharted South American river to explore his character and the motivation that drove him to seek such a challenge. Family, dogged determination, his personal philosophy, and political loss are all elements that contribute to this portrait of a complex man and make him more than a one-dimensional historical figure. Millard conducted extensive research to understand both the members of the expedition and the area through which they traveled, providing depth and detail to a real-life voyage gone wrong. In the “Notes” at the end of the book, the sources she cites fill 38 pages and include scores of news reports of the day, transcripts of lectures, and letters. The “Select Bibliography” occupies another eight pages and lists books and papers on the people of the rain forest, as well as its plants and animals, expedition members’ personal accounts of the journey, and Roosevelt’s own writing. The knowledge she acquired allows her to capture a sense of both the people and the place and the risk the explorers were taking as they headed into the unknown. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK More menacing was the constant presence of the Cinta Larga, a tribe of cannibals who blended into the landscape and never showed themselves, but kept watch on the foreigners who had encroached on their territory. Enduring near starvation as their food ran low, many members of the expedition became ill, most notably, Roosevelt himself, who was suffering from malaria and developed an infection after injuring his leg on a rock in the river. Near death, he decided to take his own life with a lethal dose of morphine, believing that it was better to sacrifice one life than risk the safety of the whole team. Kermit, however, took charge, and the expedition moved on, carrying Roosevelt on one of the dugout canoes. The expedition became an unrelenting ordeal and struggle for survival as fear, hunger, exhaustion, and disease sapped the men’s strength and spirit. Finally, they spotted evidence of rubber tappers on the river bank, signaling that they had reached a known part of the river. Settlers there gave them food and a dry place to sleep, and the worst was over... Buy a copy to keep reading!

Author: Mark DawidziakPublisher: Rowman & LittlefieldISBN: 1493029584Size: 67.99 MBFormat: PDF, KindleView: 5796Download
For history and nature fans Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most beloved U.S. presidents of all time. Handsomely designed with more than 40 illustrations and photographs. A nice gift for history buffs and naturalists. In addition to being a politician, frontiersman, and rancher, Roosevelt was an enthusiastic hunter who fought passionately for conservation. He played a significant role in setting aside land for the national parks. He participated in expeditions to benefit the New York Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian, and while in the White House, his children enjoyed the company of a menagerie of ponies, cats, dogs, lizards, rabbits, a macaw, snakes, and guinea pigs. Theodore Roosevelt for Nature Lovers is a collection of delightful anecdotes—including the famous story about the “Teddy” bear—that reveal the Bull Moose’s ongoing fascination with the natural world. Mark Dawidziak is the TV critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the author of many books, including Mark Twain for Cat Lovers (Lyons). He lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

Author: Richard ZacksPublisher: AnchorISBN: 0385534027Size: 52.38 MBFormat: PDF, ePubView: 2602Download
A ROLLICKING NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S EMBATTLED TENURE AS POLICE COMMISSIONER OF CORRUPT, PLEASURE-LOVING NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1880s, AND HIS DOOMED MISSION TO WIPE OUT VICE In the 1890s, New York City was America’s financial, manufacturing, and entertainment capital, and also its preferred destination for sin, teeming with 40,000 prostitutes, glittering casinos, and all-night dives packed onto the island’s two dozen square miles. Police captains took hefty bribes to see nothing while reformers writhed in frustration. In Island of Vice, bestselling author Richard Zacks paints a vivid picture of the lewd underbelly of 1890s New York, and of Theodore Roosevelt, the cocksure crusading police commissioner who resolved to clean up the bustling metropolis, where the silk top hats of Wall Street bobbed past teenage prostitutes trawling Broadway. Writing with great wit and zest, Zacks explores how Roosevelt went head-to-head with corrupt Tammany Hall, took midnight rambles with muckraker Jacob Riis, banned barroom drinking on Sundays, and tried to convince 2 million New Yorkers to enjoy wholesome family fun. In doing so, Teddy made a ruthless enemy of police captain “Big Bill” Devery, who grew up in the Irish slums and never tired of fighting “tin soldier” reformers. Roosevelt saw his mission as a battle of good versus evil; Devery saw prudery standing in the way of fun and profit. When righteous Roosevelt’s vice crackdown started to succeed all too well, many of his own supporters began to turn on him. Cynical newspapermen mocked his quixotic quest, his own political party abandoned him, and Roosevelt discovered that New York loves its sin more than its salvation. Zacks’s meticulous research and wonderful sense of narrative verve bring this disparate cast of both pious and bawdy New Yorkers to life. With cameos by Stephen Crane, J. P. Morgan, and Joseph Pulitzer, plus a horde of very angry cops, Island of Vice is an unforgettable portrait of turn-of-the-century New York in all its seedy glory, and a brilliant portrayal of the energetic, confident, and zealous Roosevelt, one of America’s most colorful public figures. From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Andrew JampolerPublisher: Naval Institute PressISBN: 1612512704Size: 46.76 MBFormat: PDF, MobiView: 2703Download
Lauded for his ability to tell compelling, true adventure stories, award-winning author Andrew C.A. Jampoler has turned his attention this time to a young American naval officer on a mission up the Congo River in May 1885. Lt. Emory Taunt was ordered to explore as much of the river as possible and report on opportunities for Americans in the potentially rich African marketplace. A little more than five years later, Taunt, 39, was buried near the place he had first come ashore in Africa. His personal demons and the Congo’s lethal fevers had killed him. In 2011, to better understand what happened, Jampoler retraced Taunt’s expedition in an outboard motorboat. Striking photographs from the author’s trip are included to lend a visual dimension to the original journey. Readers join Taunt in his exploration of some 1400 miles of river and follow him on two additional assignments. A commercial venture to collect elephant ivory in the river’s great basin and an appointment as the U.S. State Department’s first resident diplomat in Boma, capital of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, are filled with promise. But instead of becoming rich and famous, he died alone, bankrupt, and disgraced. Jampoler’s account of what went so dreadfully wrong is both thrilling and tragic. He provides not only a fascinating look at Taunt’s brief and extraordinary life, but also a glimpse of the role the United States played in the birth of the Congo nation, and the increasingly awkward position Washington found itself as stories of atrocities against the natives began to leak out.

Author: Ryan HolidayPublisher: PenguinISBN: 1101620595Size: 73.50 MBFormat: PDF, DocsView: 5592Download
The Obstacle is the Way has become a cult classic, beloved by men and women around the world who apply its wisdom to become more successful at whatever they do. Its many fans include a former governor and movie star (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a hip hop icon (LL Cool J), an Irish tennis pro (James McGee), an NBC sportscaster (Michele Tafoya), and the coaches and players of winning teams like the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Chicago Cubs, and University of Texas men’s basketball team. The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck. If you’re feeling frustrated, demoralized, or stuck in a rut, this book can help you turn your problems into your biggest advantages. And along the way it will inspire you with dozens of true stories of the greats from every age and era. From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Greg GrandinPublisher: Metropolitan BooksISBN: 9781429938013Size: 19.29 MBFormat: PDF, MobiView: 1884Download
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Author: Susan CheeverPublisher: VintageISBN: 0307908674Size: 18.88 MBFormat: PDF, ePub, DocsView: 1639Download
From the author of American Bloomsbury, Louisa May Alcott, and Home Before Dark, a major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America’s preeminent twentieth-century poets. At the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. E. E. Cummings was and remains controversial. He has been called “a master” (Malcolm Cowley); “hideous” (Edmund Wilson). James Dickey called him a “daringly original poet with more vitality and more sheer uncompromising talent than any other living American writer.” In Susan Cheever’s rich, illuminating biography we see Cummings’s idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his Calvinist father—distinguished Harvard professor and sternly religious minister of the Cambridge Congregational Church; his mother—loving, attentive, a source of encouragement, the aristocrat of the family, from Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers. We see Cummings—slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood, bred to be flinty and determined; his love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head, which he himself would often do, literally, to amuse. At Harvard, he roomed with John Dos Passos; befriended Lincoln Kirstein; read Latin, Greek, and French; earned two degrees; discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque at the Old Howard Theater; and raged against the school’s conservative, exclusionary upper-class rule by A. Lawrence Lowell. In Cheever’s book we see that beneath Cummings’s blissful, golden childhood the strains of sadness and rage were already at play. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority and the critical establishment, devouring the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses pushed Cummings away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem toward a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We see that Cummings’s self-imposed exile from Cambridge—a town he’d come to hate for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness, racism, and self-righteous xenophobia—seemed necessary for him as a man and a poet. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway, Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford . . . his ongoing stand against the imprisonment of his soul taking a literal turn when he was held in a makeshift prison for “undesirables and spies,” an experience that became the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room. We follow Cummings as he permanently flees to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day—Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas—and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism and through the influences of his contemporaries: Stein, Amy Lowell, Joyce, and Pound. Cheever’s fascinating book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition. (With 28 pages of black-and-white images.)

Author: Julie MellorsPublisher: Gale / Cengage LearningISBN: 9780787678777Size: 25.74 MBFormat: PDFView: 304Download
A biographical and bibliographical guide to current writers in all fields including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, journalism, drama, television and movies. Information is provided by the authors themselves or drawn from published interviews, feature stories, book reviews and other materials provided by the authors/publishers.